Unfortunately, sea level has risen 15 cm since 1950 [wikipedia.org]. The flooding from the storm surge is what causes most of the damage, not the wind. Attributing a single storm to global warming may be uncertain, but there is no uncertainty about the increased damage from the higher storm surge due to global warming.

The practical answers is to tack on a punitive carbon tax to fossil fuel.e.g. an extra $4 per gallon for gas and rising.

Direct all the revenue from this to basic research into fossil-fuel-free energy and transportation technologies.Preferably focus on research into technologies other than conventional nuclear, since it's already had 70 years of government research funding.

The reason the voices backing the science side of the debate become shrill is in response to your side's refusal to allow these sortof e

Exactly! The whole global warming sales pitch is based on the same premise - the fact is they either don't include, or don't have the measurements taken back long enough to see if this is indeed a human-induced problem, or a normal pattern. What have we been collecting meteorological data for a couple centuries now? What if this kind of thing happens every thousand years on its own?

It doesn't matter if there is a natural cycle. With global warming, it will potentially be stronger. And without the effect of arctic sea ice, those hurricanes might just continue to hit coastline instead of going out to sea to die.

The point with the natural cycle is there are only miniscule increases in number and severity of storms. Huge ones come all the time. In fact, they pointed out on NPR that there was a worse storm to hit New England in the " '80s...the 1880s"., with lols.

Every time a storm comes, zomg the sky is falling in new and horrible ways. Umm...no.

Now please explain why you told us about the mass of CO2 released by humans into the atmosphere each year, why you used a seemingly large number to I guess influence opinion, and why you neglected to be honest about how small the number you gave actually is in reality.

You want hard numbers? Humans are putting about 29,000 billion tons of CO2 into the air each year. I'm not sure which way that will influence public opinion but in reality it is quite a big number. Even compared to 5,000,000 billion.

There's a thing called 'balance', it doesn't always take a big change to upset it.

There's a well-known story about straws and camel's backs. A straw doesn't weight much, but it can be enough...

Well, that thing about straws and camels came from a story. I think it's in the Koran, but the original version certain involved Arabia, and I think it involved both Mecca and Mohammed. But I don't think even the original was presented as a fact.

This is exactly the kind of uninformed comment that convinces everybody else how full of BS the "skeptic" community is. Do you honestly believe that no scientist has ever thought to address those questions in the published scientific literature? Are you unaware that a simple search on google could answer your questions in minutes? Do you honestly think that your characterization of what you call the "global warming sales pitch" has basis in the arguments made by the scientific community? Use your head.

People are entitled to their own views, but they aren't entitled to spew their deliberately ignorant blather about the scientific community. Maybe next time you should do a simple google search before posting to slashdot instead of advertising how proudly ignorant you are.

What probably *hasn't* been pointed out to you is that climate science uses 30-year averages as their basis for "long term" and to differentiate weather vs climate.

Utter garbage. If you're going to make up shit, could you at least make up something plausible? Googling around, the error seems to come from NOAA data products [noaa.gov] (which cover 30 year time spans) that are updated every ten years. For your information, the NOAA is not climate science, but a government bureaucracy that happens to find a 30 year period useful not because it considers 30 years "long term".

1981-2010 is the latest complete 30-year set. 1951-1980 would be the prior 30-year set, thus is not relevant to what they are reporting on.

I'm sorry but if you're not aware that climate is weather occurring over a long period of time

It's not. Weather and climate are separated by time scale. One can say that climate is weather in the long term and conversely that weather is climate in the short term. But that just illustrates the division. It's not claiming that the two are the same subject.

Climate in a narrow sense is usually defined as the ï½average weatherï½, or more rigorously, as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time ranging from months to thousands or millions of years. The classical period is 30 years, as defined by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).

They give lip service to the WMO definition, but they don't agree with it.

So what's 'normal'? It seems the political GW fanatics are all over this as a big "see I told you so" kind of event.

I'm not suggesting GW does or doesn't exist, just that looking at a tiny slice of time and then sensationalizing an event which happens (time scale wise) some what regularly just pollutes the 'issue' even more and leads to bad assumptions being made (on both sides of the issue).

Scientists have warned for years that global warming would increase the likelihood of severe storms hitting the northeast corridor which could flood low lying areas and cripple infrastructure. Then we witness precisely the kind of storm that scientists have been warning us about. But somehow pointing out the years of research that predicted these kinds of events is "sensationalizing" the event.

You've got it completely backwards. The storm was sensational on its own. If anything, it is the implications of the storm and the massive devasation that it wrought that has sensationalized the research. And rightly so. Now is exactly the moment to inform the public of the risks of global warming. Global warming isn't an abstraction, it's a fact that's already happening here and now.

But you act as though freak storms are a new thing. They're not. They're rare, but they have always happened. There was not a Before Time, In the Long, Long Ago when the weather was always calm and placid, but things changed and now all of a sudden we have massive storms destroying cities year after year. It's always been that every few years there's a major storm that wrecks stuff. It's just now, those destructive but regularly occurring storms are being pointed at as the dire results of global warming.

However, the past five or so hurricane seasons were very mild. Are those mild seasons evidence global warming isn't producing "more extreme weather?" Or, let me guess, the mild seasons are also evidence of global warming. "Things will be extremely pleasant! Or extremely not pleasant! But it will always be EXTREME!" You kind of can't really have it both ways.

If the hurricanes are more powerful, that means they are using more energy, right? And my less than great understanding is that less energy equates to cooler temperatures (for a system), so does this mean the hurricanes are helping to cool the earth by converting excess heat into... well... something that's not heat( e.g. motion or water, wind, etc.)?

Note: I hope this doesn't descend into a flame-war about global warming; the main question is: whatever the temperature, does the energy dissipated by hurricanes ultimately cool the system they are in?

At a guess, hurricanes and other weather systems don't so much remove heat from the Earth as make the distribution a little more uniform. All that wind and rain and storm surge creates a lot of friction with the ground, the water, and the surrounding air. Some of the heat released will radiate off into space, sure, but most of it won't--lots of cloud cover under the circumstances, obviously. So post-Sandy, it will maybe be a little warmer in the northeast US and a little cooler in the tropical Atlantic than it would have been otherwise. I have no idea if this effect is significant enough to measure for any one storm.

If the hurricanes are more powerful, that means they are using more energy, right? And my less than great understanding is that less energy equates to cooler temperatures (for a system), so does this mean the hurricanes are helping to cool the earth by converting excess heat into... well... something that's not heat( e.g. motion or water, wind, etc.)?

A hurricane (or tropical cyclone) is a heat engine. It takes the heat from the body of water (ocean) and dumps it into a cooler body (atmosphere) while doing work (moving lots of air).

I believe the oceans cool about 3 degrees C/K from this process, so it seems like it's a way for the oceans to cool themselves down - the warmer they get, they just spin off more hurricanes.

Of course, all that useful work energy ends up as heat per the laws of thermodynamics.

Hurricanes convert a more ordered form of energy (kenetic energy in winds) into heat. That's enthropy for you.The reason there are predictions that hurricanes will be affected by accellerated global warming is that there's a well known corrolated observation: As a tropical depression's center moves over warm water (specifically anything over 94 degreees F), the depression grows. Over slightly cooler water it doesn't, and when it passes over much cooler water, it shrinks. That's been a very reliable observat

I've stated this before on/. but I'm too lazy to search for it:
There are two morals to that fable. One for children: don't lie or a wolf will eat you because no one will believe you. One for adults: always treat an alarm as real because sometimes it is and a kid might get eaten; also repeat the fable so that fewer false alarms occur.

Right. So if you want to convince people of that fact, stop making claims you either a) can't back up, or b) simply aren't true (i.e. don't try to claim that weather=climate if and only if it supports your position, which both sides do all the time). Is the Earth getting warmer? Yes. Is human activity aiding that process? Yes. Is Sandy the result of human activity? We have no idea. Statistics doesn't work like that, you can't predict individual events. And global warming (all weather and climate, for that matter) is purely statistics. So stop attributing individual events to global warming (or "climate change", which I believe is the current trendy term for it).

I think the article makes a great metaphor of global warming causing more energy to be in the ocean, similar to steroids in baseball boosting strength

stop attributing individual events to global warming

Or as they could say in baseball, "stop attributing a particular home run to steroids", despite a clear, direct correlation between taking steroids and hitting the baseball harder, and a jump in the number of homeruns for the season. You can't simply say, this home run was natural, and that one was ent

Large is good, the energy is spread out over a greater area. Did you notice (a lot) more people die with the smaller ones?

You want big, they're weaker Sandy 1 & 2. Katrina was a 5 and smaller and moved more quickly. It had way more energy. Sandy just had the bad taste to hit the NYSE, but really it was fairly unremarkable and wouldn't have raised so much as an eyebrow if it hadn't hit NYC.

On the bright side it did destroy area and buildings Jersey Shore used for that horrible show which is to date the best argument for the existence of God.

Here's the best analogy I've seen to explain this Global Warming "input" and not necessarily "causation" in a way that even the deniers can understand it;

Do Steroids make home runs for Barry Bonds? No.But do Steroids help that single run turn into a homer? Yes.

Global Warming doesn't necessarily MAKE all the hurricanes dangerous. But higher ocean levels, warmer surface temps, disruption of weather patterns and more water vapor in the atmosphere intensify it and make extremes more likely.

Global Warming is like steroids; if your summer breeze is just chilling on the sofa; no home runs.

Actually, we (the set of people who took statistics classes in college) will continue to attribute the increased frequency of extreme weather events to global warming. Some of us (the set of people who also possess a sense of humor) will continue to point and laugh at the deniers and lump them in with the birthers, creationists, and moon landing hoax folks.
Categorical denial of science is a disease that cannot be cured, only prevented. Educate your children, it is the only effective vaccination against idiocy.

I don't think unpredictable weather patterns mean global warming is false. In terms of scientific method, saying Sandy was a result of global warming is probably a dramatic overstatement.

In terms of PR, it's a good move that I agree with because I'm convinced global warming is a threat. It's not the "cleanest" way to get the public and voters on board with curbing carbon emissions, but this is public policy. The fossil fuel industry isn't playing straight either, they're engaging in all the FUD they

Could you clarify who "you guys" is? Recently, I feel like I'm being lumped into a whole lot of different, frequently orthogonal, categories.

Just a hint: in this case, you guys is Bloomberg Businessweek. In other words, is starting to seep into the bastions of business and corporate bottomline that maybe, just maybe, this entire Climate Change should be something of concern to businesses.

Yes, they got it wrong, but give them a few years. They are just starting paying attention, so you can't really blame the

No. I haven't read that one and neither of you since Peter and the Wolf [wikipedia.org] is a 1936 classical composition by Sergei Prokofiev, where the boy beats the wolf at the end and rescues his animal friends.

I believe what you meant to refer to is the Aesop fable of the Boy Who Cried Wolf [wikipedia.org].

Wow, that is a retarded question. Arctic ice doesn't block the damn jetstream. A millisecond of thinking, which I realise is a stretch for you, should tell you that the ice is at just a tad lower altitude.

Temperatute changes on the other hand change the relative temperature difference between the pole and the equator, and that probably does have an impact on the jetstream. It's only an hypothesis but what they are thinking is that the higher temperature pole sees the causes the jetstream to be in a differen

Yeah, back in the 1970's the Citigroup Center in New York needed an emergency retrofit due to a design flaw in bolts used to hold the building together. Basically, wind-shear from.. wait for it... a hurricane could topple the building. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citigroup_Center)

So in the 1970's it was common knowledge that New York could and would be hit by hurricanes and it was considered a real enough threat that the engineers went on an emergency retrofitting job to fix the problem once it was discovered. In 2012 a CAT 1 Hurricane actually hits New York, which was 100% expected, and frankly weaker than predicted hurricanes that could hit New York. Of course these inconvenient facts won't deter the alarmist conclusion: GLOBAL WARMING!!!

So in the 70's, engineers and scientists looked at available data and said that the infrastructure may not be adequate to provide safety margins for possible weather conditions -- and you say that was good! (And I agree!)

And so now, scientists and engineers look at data and suggest that infrastructure may not be adequate to provide safety margins for possible weather conditions -- and you imply that is alarmist!

Those folks in the 70s did not know for a fact what was going to happen, they made their best estimates and guesses, hedged them for safety and did a cost/benefit analysis and decided to do the retrofit. I don't see why following the same process today makes people "alarmists".

They did not know NYC would be hit by a hurricane, they knew it COULD be hit by a hurricane and took precautions.

I have smoke detectors not because I know there will be a fire, but because I know there COULD be a fire, so I take precautions. I spend money on batteries for the detectors and I also have an extinguisher I occasionally have to replace. I have never once had a fire in my house - am I an alarmist?

No. Both cases are looking at the range of possibilities, hedging for safety, and making a cost/benefit analysis.

The article was not merely about Sandy hitting NYC, but rather about a possible upward trend in severity and possible relationships between that uptick and observations that are generally associated with global climate change theories (increased sea and air temperatures and changes in global weather patterns). There is clearly evidence that global warming COULD be an issue. Only a fool would disregard the possibility. So, like Woodsy Owl used to say "give a hoot, don't pollute"!

No, it's the alarmists who haven't read all the literature and cling to an unproven hypothesis that no government has accepted yet, that NASA proved faulty and even their own spiritual leader has backpedaled on.

James "Gaia theory" Lovelock gives up (2012): "The problem is we don't know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books — mine included — because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn't happened," Lovelock said. "The climate is doing its usual tricks. There's nothing much really happening yet. We were supposed to be halfway toward a frying world now," he said. "The world has not warmed up very much since the millennium. Twelve years is a reasonable time it (the temperature) has stayed almost constant, whereas it should have been rising — carbon dioxide is rising, no question about that," he added.' Lovelock still believes the climate is changing, but at a much, much slower pace."http://rs79.vrx.net/opinions/ideas/climate/no_consensus/its_over/ [vrx.net]

Global warming is so 1985. It's not like we haven't known about it since the 1940s, nobody could figure out a way to make money of it until now, so they're exploiting it for all it's worth now. And you're helping. *slow clap*

If the theories are correct, then the right of industries to emit carbon is at odds with my rights to an unadulterated climate. Alternatively, their externalized costs are becoming our internalized costs. If the government is not the best option to balance our interests, what is? Firearms?

From Dr. Jeff Masters blog at wunderground.com: [wunderground.com]
April 5, 2012 - "Expect one of the quietest Atlantic hurricane seasons since 1995 this year, say the hurricane forecasting team of Dr. Phil Klotzbach and Dr. Bill Gray of Colorado State University (CSU) in their latest seasonal forecast issued April 4. They call for an Atlantic hurricane season with below-average activity"

So cyclonic storms are in the October just past are stronger than the average over a short 30 year time period. Notable, but not surprising, as all weather is cyclical.

It could suggest a more active season or it could be an outlier month. Since we have solar cycles that indeed control the total energy into the surface of the planet, I would suspect that plays the dominant role, but a single data set on only one item, the hurricanes and their strength, is not very significant.

It's NOT global warming stupid. This has happened before. For example:

In **1938** the New England Hurricane - aka "Long Island Express" hit New York as a Cat 3. Wind was around 120mph, and the storm surge was 18 feet (4+ feet higher than Sandy). Thousands of boats and nearly 10,000 houses were destroyed. There were ~60 deaths recorded, and hundreds of injuries. As the storm progressed, it killed over 600 people in New England and destroyed 50,000+ homes. Total property loss/damage is estimated at ~$5 billion (today's dollars).

New York has felt the impact of hurricanes, to a greater or lesser extent, over 90 times since 1804. Nothing new here... move along (and send help to the people up there who are suffering right now - they need food, fuel and water - regardless of what nonsense the media is telling you).

These nut jobs who proclaim global warming and cite all kinds of fabricated or exaggerated "evidence" are the same nut jobs who were proclaiming a global ice age when I was growing up. Wake up people, what we are experiencing is the cyclical nature of nature. Some day we will experience intense heating, and some day we will experience another ice age, and us puny little peons (humans) are completely powerless to cause it or stop it.

Sediments indicate that more and stronger hurricanes made landfall in the area in the 13th and 15th century than at any time since European settlement of New England.

Nothing about Sandy has anything to do with climate change. It was to be expected and people have been warned, though all warnings fell on deaf ears just as in New Orleans. Now, the established procedure is repeated, people moan, complain and blame climate change instead of their incompetent politicians failing to do anything about lack of storm protection for half a century and more - despite the threat being absolutely obvious to anyone daring to have a look at history.

Unfortunately, the USA is a country that collectively doesn't dare to look back into its own history and is thus constantly surprised by every single repetition of things that happened several times before.

The experts at the NHC can't reliably forecast a given hurricane's strength 3 days in advance, even for the killer systems that undergo rapid intensification, a process which requires massive amounts of energy in a small and narrow zone of the atmosphere (read: should be easy to forecast from their spot atmospheric measurements but is not), yet armchair scientists can somehow surmise that a specific storm did what it did based on the sparse influences of a 100 year global warming weather pattern. It's beyond laughable.

We've been building up a lot of energy in the latent heat in the oceans over the last few decades of global warming. Now that the temperatures are no longer rising that energy is going to get spit back out into space somehow, somewhere. This time it happened in Manhattan.

As long as global cooling continues we are going to see some big storms. The atmosphere is a heat engine. When there is a temperature difference work can get done. This "work" in the atmosphere presents itself as wind and rain. The gr

Realistically speaking there is practically NOTHING that can be done about it. Unless a dictator conquers the planet and rules with an iron fist (not what I would want!) the chances of reducing carbon emissions radically enough to make a difference is practically zero.

Maybe 30% above the mild seasons we've had since Katrina. You know, the "OMGWEREALLGONNADIE" hurricane seasons were supposed to start having due to global warming. Now we have a storm that briefly peaked at CAT2, and did most of its damage as a CAT1, and the chicken littles are out in force again.

You know, it's people like you who are obsessed with Al Gore. I've never paid him much attention because it's the scientists and their work that really matters. Gore is just like a spokesmodel for the subject.

What's the average deviation? Last time I heard expert meteorologists talking like this, it was right after Katrina, predicting the next year would be severe, too, which it wasn't, demonstrating complete ignorance of statistics, regression to the mean, and chaos theory.

Given it was attempts to simulate and predict weather that lead to the discovery of chaos theory and the butterfly effect, this is particularly shameful.

Even a Cat 1 hurricane that turns inland around NY happens maybe once a century. (Three times, now, two in the last two years.) They generally go up the coast. If that weren't concerning enough, we have the storm surge, together with the threat of rising oceans. It's not we're-all-gonna-die territory. But it's not good, and NY should be spending billions building seawalls capable of holding back the ocean.

The Saffir–Simpson Hurricane Scale only measures a hurricane's maximum wind speed. While this is reasonably correlated with the damage a hurricane inflicts, it is far from a complete picture. Notably, it disregards:Storm size - Sandy was a very wide hurricane, and so the damage was more widespreadStorm surge - Sandy had a very large storm surge, and hit an area that is poorly protected from floodingRainfall - Hurricanes that drop enough water quickly enough can cause flash floodsStorm speed - SSHS only measures the wind speed relative to the storm. If the storm itself advances rapidly, it can cause significantly more damage than it would otherwise

This study used an alternative measurement - the total kinetic energy of the storm. This is a relatively good measure of the power of a hurricane season.

PS: We've had "mild" seasons since Katrina? News to me, considering 2007 had multiple Category 5s, 2010 is the third-most active season on record, and most of the other years were at best "average". 2006 was actually the only one to be below average.

On the one hand, we've got the world's largest reinsurance agency, Munich Re, frankly describing not only how global warming has increased the severity of weather in North America including heatwaves, droughts, floods, and tropical cyclones, but also the trend of weather related losses. Their report [munichre.com] goes on to describe the stark risks insurers will need to address in the new earth climate.

On the other, we've got snotty ignoramuses and John Birch conspiracy theorists that can't even be bothered to RTFA.

The wind speed might have only reached a cat 2 but it was among the strongest storms ever for storm surge intensity and the lowest pressure storm to ever make landfall north of Cape Hatteras. In fact Sandy packed the second highest total energy [washingtonpost.com] (IKE) of any storm in modern history.

Unless you're a YEC where 120 million years ago was actually 6000 years ago with some tricks to make it look older put there by Satan, your fix there is bollocks.

Climate Change: dramatically increasing the amount of "Whooooosh!" over the past 15 years.

Sorry, but with the amount of crazy denialism out there on the far right that it has become impossible to tell the parodies from the real thing nowadays. I even heard a good one on the radio this morning. Someone was at a Romney rally and started heckling the candidate. He held up a sign saying "end climate silence" and called for the candidates to address the issue in the wake of Sandy. The crowd started booing him, then started chanting "USA! USA! USA!" and he was led out by the secret service.

The "both sides are as bad" argument is just another piece of false balance invented by the lazy USAian media. Sure there are a few nutjobs on the left who think that vaccines cause autism and the like, but denial of hard science is much more prevalent on the right. Fact.

You're comparing the entire 2011 hurricane season to a single month in 2012. If you keep trying to mislead people, then at this rate pretty soon you'll be trying to compare the weather during a single day to every hurricane in the previous century.

So so far there have been more hurricanes this year than last, though not quite as strong (at least not on the top end.) Of course we still have a month or so to go before we can really tally up the statistics.

No, we all know its Carbon Dioxide that is responsible for global warming, it has nothing to do with the big glowing ball of gas in the sky. The interweb ignores the fact that global warming seems to coincide with the point in the millennial solar cycle it at highest energy output because we have only recorded weather in 'modern" times for the last 100 years or so. 100 years of a global warming trend which happens to coincide with an increase CO2 output means we have done it to ourselves, nature cannot pos